Saturday, November 2, 2013

This morning we participated in a global pumpkin seed project. See the instructions here. We asked our families to donate a pumpkin. We received 9 pumpkins, so each table was ably to do their own pumpkin investigation. Students predicted, weighed, measured and counted during their investigations. We had so much fun!
Here are some padlet walls with our learning from the day. We first scanned the QR code for the K in what we KNOW about pumpkins, then we did the W for the what we WANT to know about pumpkins, then we did the L for what we LEARNED about pumpkins.

We are in the fourth rotation of our blogging community group and we are the focus class this week. We would like to welcome you to our new class blog. We live in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Our school's name is Eastwood Public School. We are a kindergarten to grade 8 school, with around 300 students. We are an open concept school, which means that there aren't many walls in our school. We share a large room with 2 other classes and 2 other teachers.
We are fortunate to have 20 iPads in our room that we share, and an Apple TV. We love creating content and sharing it with our peers through our blogs. We also have a classroom Twitter account that we tweet from daily. Please connect with us @MrsWideensClass.
We are very excited for this Thursday because it is Halloween and Read-O-Ween, here at school. We will be reading in the morning, then we will travel to different classrooms to participate in various literacy activities. We get to dress up like our favorite book characters.
Please take a look at our posts on our blog. We can’t wait to connect with you!

Today, AM 800 came to our classroom because we were picked as their class of the week! Mr. Arms Bumalag came in and talked to us about being on the radio and television. Did you know that approximately 1500 schools apply to be classroom of the week? He then interviewed some of the students about what they were going to be for Halloween. The interview will be on the radio tomorrow. It was a real honor! We also each got a pancake breakfast from McDonald and a new backpack!

Today we had a refresher on what a noun is. We also talked about proper nouns and that they ALWAYS begin with a capital. We first watched a short video about nouns on Brainpopjr. We then made an anchor chart about nouns. Students were then given the choice to create a chart on the iPads using the app Popplet or they could use their thinking books to show their learning. Here are a few of the finished pieces.
Some of the students also published their work to their blogs and on Twitter.

Last Friday we participated in the O.R.E.O Challenge. This challenge was created by a teacher Jen Wagner . She invited Classrooms around the world to participate. Each student needed to stack oreo® cookies as high as he or she could and then average all their individual results to achieve a final Class result. We then recorded the results on the main project webpage to see how our average measured up to the rest of the classes. (Our average stack was 19).
After the students finished the stacking they were invited to create a sculpture from the Oreo cookies that were used. It got very messy and fun!
Here is a short video on the O.R.E.O challenge in our classroom.

We just completed our first math unit on patterning. We love using our iPads to capture and show our learning. Here are a few of our learning goal we completed and a few examples of how we showed our learning using our iPads:
Learning Goal - to be able to create a pattern and explain the core
Students took a picture of their pattern then use an app to draw a circle around the core of the pattern and uploaded it to their blog. Here are a couple of examples:

The second learning goal was to be able represent a pattern in different ways. After the lesson. Students got out the iPads, manipulatives, paper, markers and whatever else they wanted that would help them to answer the problem prompt.
Create a pattern using three colours of snap cubes. Find another way you can represent your pattern.